goldengod

Somewhere by Andrew Ferguson

The Ad Generator is an art project created by Alexis Lloyd as a part of her Masters thesis in Fine Arts. By mashing up remixed slogans with images from Flickr, she explores the layers of meaning within modern ads.

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.

I really like the fact that she took it one step further than simple slogan and image mashup by adding an element of randomness. It raises questions about the meaning of language in advertising and sometimes results in some classy Engrish.

How can something that normally seems meaningful appear so nonsensical without proper context? The elements of advertising work together to attack a part of our brain that we ourselves are not fully aware of. New Scientist has an excellent short piece on branding and the brain.

Disagreement by Andrew Ferguson

Tasty brainmeats aside, I can think of at least a couple ways to improve on the ad generator. Even now I want to set it to only choose photos from the first page or two of Flickr’s interestingness search.

This will result in photos that are higher quality and, well, more interesting. Most of the photos that the program selects now are pretty low quality and bad photographs overall, something we don’t generally associate with advertising. Ads should be shiny and beautiful and look like they took forty devout monks eighteen weeks to create using unicorn-hair calligraphy brushes goddamnit!

That’s not to say the ads created by the generator aren’t impressive. Sometimes, the generator is nothing short of genius. The pairing of the phrase “LOVE IS MILK” with a phonecam shot of a bloody tampon is truly a thing of beauty.